One thing never ceased to puzzle him, though. How was it that a bar with so rare a beauty in the house could remain in such a fearsomely depressed state no matter when he went? Why had he never once seen the bar draw a large, boisterous crowd?
What Mr. Aoki told his wife was not exactly as written here, but it covered roughly the same ground.
“That’s it?”
“Uh-huh.”
Mrs. Aoki let out a little laugh. “You never told me anything like that before.”
“Well, if I’m always getting jilted . . .”
“But I don’t suppose you always were, were you?” she shot back.
His throat tightened.
“Never mind,” she went on. “You don’t have to tell me. I know you won’t tell me the truth anyway, so forget it.”
How could she have been so dense? she wondered. The news that her husband had been fired for embezzling money had put her in such a state of shock that she’d been going around as if in a trance.
There’s another woman! My husband spent all that money on another woman!
It had hit her like a thunderbolt as she listened to her husband’s story. A violent quaking seized her heart, but she took care to hide it, and when her husband was through, she moved swiftly to head off any further confessions of a similar kind.
The story her husband had told her meant nothing to him. The secret he had to guard was something else entirely, and the story of the girl who grew up in Harbin and looked like the French movie star was nothing more than a smokescreen. She knew this instinctively.
If she were to press him, her husband would no doubt entertain her with other stories about women—stories to make her think he was being open, while in fact steering clear of any real danger. But she would not fall for that.
The things that didn’t really matter he could speak of with abandon. But behind them all there was something this man would not touch with the tiniest tip of a needle.
A Medusa’s head.
She must not attempt to see it. She must not pursue. She must quietly pretend to suspect nothing at all.
“Talk to me,” she had said, but not in her remotest dreams had she anticipated this result. When she’d suggested he tell her about the bars he went to, she really had thought it might help raise their spirits. But look what had happened instead! Quite without intending, she’d built herself a trap, and she hadn’t even realized it until after she’d thrown herself into it.
The next evening, Mr. Aoki once again went off to the pool with the boys, and as she prepared dinner at home Mrs. Aoki wondered how long these curious days would go on. Their household kitty would be exhausted in two weeks. Their savings account had long been empty—they were both the kind who spent whatever money they had. So once they used up what was on hand, they would have to start pawning their possessions. Would that get them through another six months, perhaps?
Her own family had prospered in the foreign trade before the war, but they’d fallen on hard times since. As for her husband’s side, his three brothers all subsisted on the meager wages of civil servants and salarymen. She’d never given it the slightest thought before, but this crisis had awakened her to the fact that she and her husband were like orphans, without any family they could turn to for help in times of need.
Were it not for the children, they might somehow manage. If Mrs. Aoki went out and got a job, she no doubt could fill at least her own stomach—though, lacking any skills, she’d have to be prepared for the worst. But with two grade-school-age boys at home, any such plan was out of the question.
That meant that unless her husband succeeded in finding a new job, their family of four could no longer stay together. But where on earth was he likely to find an employer willing to take in and provide for a married man of forty who’d been fired from his job and thrown out onto the streets?
Mrs. Aoki tried to recall what kinds of things had gone through her mind while preparing dinner just one week before, but she could not remember a single thing.
Somewhere along the line, for some unfathomable reason, her whole world had been transformed. How could a single bolt from the blue have twisted the course of their lives so completely awry, leaving them to suffer such undue pain and fear? What sort of god had permitted this catastrophe to occur?
The motions she was going through now, lighting the stove or taking the frying pan off the heat: what meaning did any of this have? Why did her hands go on working so busily as though nothing were amiss? Why did she still find herself going through the same routine motions she had gone through day in and day out for as long as she could remember? Was the whole thing just some bizarre mistake?
All of a sudden she felt like everything was collapsing into an ever more incomprehensible jumble.
That night, after the boys were in bed, Mr. Aoki sipped at some whiskey and told his wife this story.
In the building where I work, there’s a mail chute next to the elevator on each floor. It’s essentially a long square tube running all the way from the ninth floor down to the first. The side facing the hallway is clear, so you can watch from the outside as your letter begins to fall. Sometimes when you’re walking by, you see a white envelope drop soundlessly through the chute from ceiling to floor; or you see several, one after the other.
The hallway happens to be very dim, and it can give you quite a start to see one of these flashes of white go by when there’s no one else around. I’m not quite sure what to say it’s like. It’s like a ghost, maybe—like some strange, lonely spirit.
One step away, in all the offices along the hallway, is a world where you don’t dare let down your guard for a single moment. That’s why you get such a start when you emerge into the hallway, to go to the bathroom or something, and you see one of those white flashes.
Some mornings, when I have something I need to get done early, I arrive at work before the normal starting time. I glance around the office, looking at all the empty chairs waiting for the people who usually work there to arrive. Each chair, in the absence of its occupant, seems to assume the shape of its occupant’s head, or the way he moves his eyes, or the turn of his lips when he speaks, or the curve of his back as he hunches over his desk.
The patent leather seat where the occupant will soon plant his bottom shines like it was polished with oils that oozed from his body. It’s as if, through the years, each man’s indignations and frettings and gripes and laments, or his incessant fears and anxieties, have been slowly secreted from his body in the form of an oil. At least that’s how it always seems to me.
Each chairback, too, uniquely bent by the press of its occupant’s own back, seems to express that man’s feelings about his workplace. Willy-nilly, day after day, he’s had to come into this office and set himself down on that same desk chair. Is it any wonder that something of his heart might transfer itself to the chair?
I look quietly down at my own chair as well, thinking, Ahh, what a pitiable chair. What a poor, wretched, acting section head’s chair . . .
And I wonder: When have I ever sat here without feeling afraid? If someone behind me suddenly clears his throat, it practically startles me right out of my seat.
I know I’m not the only one who trembles in such constant fear. I can see it in the others’ faces